Vote for Things

Tom Tango’s Fans Scouting Report has been live for a while now, and if you haven’t done so yet consider taking the opportunity to cast your ballot. I’ll let Tango explain:

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondel White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

The Project

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2014, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

This is your chance to show off your scouting chops, whether you catch the Padres (or any other team, obviously) on TV often or watch many games live at Petco. As Tango later mentions, remember to forget about what the numbers say — whether advanced or traditional — and go strictly with your observational acumen.

The Padres only have 19 ballots filled out as of this writing, which is more than only the Miami Marlins and Colorado Rockies. So we have some work to do.

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While we’re on the subject, the Internet Baseball Awards — the far superior cousin to the traditional baseball awards — also went live yesterday. You do need a Baseball Prospectus account to vote, but BP’s basic subscription is free and, as a bonus, you’re eligible to win cool prizes for casting your ballot.

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